8. Chinese Font

The original subsystem is referred to as the "core X font subsystem". Fonts rendered by this subsystem are not anti-aliased, are handled by the X server, and have names like:

-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

The newer font subsystem is known as "fontconfig", and allows applications direct access to the font files. Fontconfig is often used along with the Xft library, which allows applications to render fontconfig fonts to the screen with antialiasing. Fontconfig uses more human-friendly names like:

Luxi Sans-10

Applications using the Qt 4 or GTK 2 toolkits (which would include KDE and GNOME applications) use the fontconfig and Xft font subsystem; most everything else uses the core X fonts.

Chinese Font in FireFox

Firefox is a GTK application and therefore it use the xft font system. To make Firefox display Chinese, we need to download the corresponding Chinese fonts :